Page 1154 - Week 04 - Tuesday, 8 April 2008
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regime in relation to certain dealings with GMOs. The passage of this bill will secure the ACT’s participation in the cooperative national regulatory scheme. It will ensure consistency of decision making across Australia and maximise the ability of the scheme to protect the ACT community and the environment. I thank members for their contribution.
Question resolved in the affirmative.
Bill agreed to in principle.
Leave granted to dispense with the detail stage.
Bill agreed to.
Adjournment
Motion by Ms Gallagher proposed:
That the Assembly do now adjourn.
Mr Charlie Fletcher
MR SESELJA (Molonglo—Leader of the Opposition) (6.05): I would like to take the opportunity to say a few words tonight about Charlie Fletcher, whose funeral I attended on the Tuesday after Easter. Much of this is taken from the eulogy that was given, and I wanted to put some of that on the record.
Charles Patrick Fletcher was born in October 1918, on a property in Eucumbene Road between Berridale and Adaminaby in the Snowy Mountains. Charlie’s family has lived in the Snowy Mountains since the 1860s, when two brothers from Sheffield arrived in Kiandra looking for gold. They did not find any gold and became farmers instead. Farming has run in the veins of the family ever since.
Charlie had eight brothers and sisters. From the late 1920s, the family lived at Bellevue, a property just down the road from Charlie’s birth place. Charlie and most of his siblings went to a little school at Rocky Plains, travelling on horseback or in a dray.
He left school during the Depression and, like many young country boys, found work where he could—rabbiting, ringbarking, fencing, hiring himself out as a farm labourer. In the late 1930s, he helped a number of his brothers build the old Alpine Hut. Over several winters he worked at the hut as a cook. This was a wonderful job for a young man who loved to ski. He worked in the mornings and skied in the afternoons. A little later he became a champion skier. More generally, he was a fine athlete.
Charlie enlisted in the army in December 1942 and was discharged in 1946. He served in Papua New Guinea and Singapore. In 1950 he married Gert. When the family moved to Queanbeyan in the late 1950s, Charlie and Gert bought a block in Caley Place, Narrabundah, and then over the next four years or so Charlie built the
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